Beginnings
by internationallyposh
Summary: There were many times Edward heard the agony of being turned: first felt in himself, then remembered with his family. There were many moments in which Alice wished she could speak to Edward before he ever knew her name. One-shot vignettes over a century before he met Bella.


II. 1917

It was cold in Chicago when Carlisle turned him. A kind of coldness that rivaled his new body and sent shivers down his spine when snowflakes did not melt on his skin.

Edward Masen had been seventeen years old, dreaming of war, of the enemy not even two weeks prior. It struck pain and fear and anger in his chest to have the enemy reside in his soul and not on some distant battlefield. He could hardly look at himself, at first— the blood red eyes only confirmed the presence of the monster within. Not to mention the absolute insatiety of drinking blood. When he first woke, after what seemed like an eternity of burning and confusion of seeing the sun-doctor's face in a blur of swimming visions, he was so thirsty and hungry-sick, like he'd spent the last seventeen years starving.

Carlisle caught him, once, staring at the mirror. Edward had turned around viciously at the sight of the young blond man behind him, not to mention the interference of new thoughts he couldn't tune out.

"Your eyes will turn golden eventually," Carlisle said softly, aloud. "I know that it is troublesome at the beginning…"

"Troublesome?" Edward echoed. "I'm a monster. A demon. My eyes alone are all the proof anyone would need."

Later on, Edward would come to regret being so cruel to Carlisle, with the knowledge that the man was truly good and not simply putting on a show. Late at night, when the thirst kept Edward almost shaking from determination not to jump out of the window at every passerby that happened to cross the street, Carlisle told Edward stories to distract him.

It was best to be told stories by Carlisle when he spoke the words and let images flow through his mind freely. It was like a live-action, moving storybook. Edward could see the exact curve of the English Channel, although he'd never been as a vampire and his human memories were murky and mutable. Human memories shifted like sand through a funnel with every passing day, getting harder to remember. Edward saw images of the countryside where Carlisle first fled to avoid all humans, and the shock of seeing himself for the first time in a dirty mirror in a dusty barn. Carlisle, the son of a pastor and clearly aware of what he had become, was even more despondent than Edward had been in the beginning.

"And it goes away?" Edward had asked, desperate and young. He was still a child then, after all, truly only seventeen years old. "The… hatred?"

Carlisle's mind flickered with doubt, but he gave Edward a small smile. "Yes. I believe so."

Carlisle was wrong. The hatred only grew as time passed, as Edward grew more and more inhumane and lost those small vestiges of humanity he had once clung onto so deeply.

II. 1933

Rosalie Hale was perhaps the most beautiful woman Edward had ever seen thus far. Yet his lip curled with disgust as he heard her scream from downstairs, Esme and Carlisle trying to reassure the girl without much success. Edward rolled his eyes when he heard Esme tell the girl it was almost over: it had barely just begun, the worst of it at least. Rosalie Hale's half-human heart beat erratically and violently against the walls of her hardening chest. Her mind screamed for death: her voice did, too. Edward heard Carlisle's mind wavering. He was wondering if—

"No. It's too late." Edward said softly as he placed one of his old leather-bound journals back into its place on his desk. He knew Carlisle would hear him even from all the way upstairs. "You made your choice, Carlisle."

Carlisle let the image of mercy-killing Rosalie Hale disappear out of his mind in an instant, guilt taking over his thoughts. A picture of Rosalie on Edward's arm snuck into his head, and Edward swore aloud so that Carlisle would be able to hear his disgust.

 _She's beautiful, Edward. And she was hurt very badly by those men._

"She's extremely beautiful. But her mind is as shallow as a pond. I've heard her thoughts, Carlisle, or do you forget?" Edward sighed. "Regardless, she's part of our family now. We have an obligation to her." Edward did not add his last thought aloud, as he frequently censored his true thoughts from his god-like creator, but he thought they rather owed Rosalie Hale the opportunity for revenge, too.

He might have detested the girl's shallow thoughts and rather resented her beauty simply for the reason it was the cause of her obscene vanity, but he would help her send those men to Hell if she wished. But he had a feeling it was something Rosalie Hale would want to orchestrate by herself.

III. 1935

The Great Depression had turned rural Tennessee into even a more poverty-stricken area than before the effects of the 1929 Stock Market Crash hit the area. Carlisle thought it his duty to provide medical care to those who had no access to it, or only to myths and legends and wives' tales, like the women who thought it God's Punishment to have a labor with any painkiller, or the men who thought whiskey in the morning was good for the health.

Rosalie brought him home, bloody and moaning and damn near dead, her lips untouched with blood, her eyes frantic. "Save him," she said to Carlisle, thrusting his sizable frame to him. Carlisle's eyes widened in alarm as he took in the boy before him. "This one— he's different. He needs me." Edward heard the silent proclamation in her thoughts, which were for once focused on something else besides her confliction of hating her unchanging body and fawning over her newly-obtained Goddess-like beauty. _I need him._

"I will try." Carlisle said, immediately taking the boy to the basement, where he had an emergency office set up with a gurney and various accumulated medical instruments. Edward closed his eyes as he heard the boy's shocked intake of breath when Carlisle's venom reached his heart. His now-active mind now raced with confusion, fear, and panic as the pain overtook him.

Not again. Edward couldn't withstand the screams that were just beginning. As he flitted downstairs with the intention of going on a hunt and then roaming the streets of Boston for criminals he might deter (but not kill, no, Edward was done with drinking the blood of humans as he remembered with disgust the red of his eyes from his wild years) from committing rape or murder or theft, he saw Rosalie motionless in the living room, struck still and silent from the boy downstairs.

"Aren't you going to help Carlisle?" Edward asked icily. He thought it rather hypocritical that Rosalie have Carlisle turn someone when her favorite topic of conversation was how horrible she thought life as a vampire was treating her.

"I—" For once, Rosalie did not have a quick rebuttal or rude reply. She blinked unnecessarily at Edward, another fading vestige of her humanity, and went downstairs without another word. Edward turned and walked out the door, hearing her murmured consoles to the boy whose name he did not know.

The boy thought Rosalie was an angel. Edward's still heart hurt for just one moment to think that he would soon be alone with four people in love with each other and not just two.

IV. 1950

The girl—

 _My name is Alice!_ She thought in excitement, looking straight at Edward. He looked at her in confusion and surprise: not only that she and the blond, angsty-looking boy were standing in his house after he returned home from a hunt, but that she was a vampire, and also that she somehow knew his capability to read minds.

"And this is Jasper. We're your new brother and sister." Alice added aloud, giving him a radiant smile. She was small and petite and pixie-like in a poodle skirt and sweater set, shiny hair slicked into a smooth bobbed curl. Edward didn't say anything, but looked to Carlisle and Esme beside the two in bewilderment for an explanation.

"Alice and Jasper have found us after almost a year of searching," Carlisle explained. "Alice can…."

An image knocked insistently at his mind from Alice. Edward and Jasper, play-fighting in a large, unfamiliar yard that Edward had no recollection of. It was raining heavily, and Edward saw himself laugh, shaking drops of rain out of his hair as Emmett joined in. The image— memory?— stopped abruptly, replaced by Alice's inner thoughts. _I can see the future, Edward. I've known your name since—_

Alice revealed a scrawled portrait out of her memory. It was a hasty drawing, but undeniable: Carlisle and Edward's stoic faces, the glint of their golden eyes apparent even without color. _That was when I started drinking from animals. Before I found Jasper. I knew that it was the right way when I saw you and Carlisle in a vision some five years back._

Edward had never quite met another vampire with a talent so apparent as Alice's. He looked at her in awe, only to have Jasper's thoughts infiltrate his own and feel a strange presence of mild hostility. _Alice is mine. And I am Alice's,_ Jasper thought.

"It's not like that." Edward said. He looked away from Alice at to Jasper. "I've just never met someone… quite gifted, like me or her."

"And me." Jasper grinned at Edward, and sent a wave of absolute hilarity at him, so hard that Edward nearly keeled over from laughter, which sent Emmett into a loud guffaw. Alice laughed, too, and even Rosalie cracked a smile.

"You—" Edward gasped.

"Can control your emotions. But don't worry. I usually use it for good. And you'd be able to tell if I didn't anyway, wouldn't you, mind reader?" Jasper's eyes were still red, a detail that unsettled Edward only slightly. He was more interested in the couple's backstory than Jasper's apparent taste for human blood at the moment.

"Yes, I suppose so." Edward said as he collected himself, slightly embarrassed at his outburst even though it was out of his control.

"And Edward?" Alice said, a glint in her eye. "Jasper and I might have… taken over your bedroom."

Edward wheeled to Carlisle immediately. "You let her do this? To my bedroom? The one I have occupied for the last three years?"

Esme let out a small, content chuckle, but Edward paid her no heed in his immediate irritation. Carlisle barely contained his own amused grin, but attempted to reassure Edward with a sympathetic shrug. "Son, I got home and she'd already set up her room and moved all your things to the room on the third floor. She said that you'd grow to like it better eventually, anyway."

Alice got Edward's attention with a picture of him, stretched out on his black leather ottoman in his room, listening to records and re-reading the latest Steinbeck novel. Edward noted that his future self did look rather peaceful, and that he hated living on the same floor as Rosalie and Emmett, anyway.

"For once, he's not being irritable." Rosalie muttered. "If we'd tried that—"

"Edward and I are going to be very good friends in no time." Alice chirped. She looked around at all of them, her new family, with bright eyes. "All of us will be."

But Edward felt often, sometimes, in the next few months, that Alice seemed to be hiding something small from time to time. Some days, he broke through her walls to find out what it was. It could be something simple, like a vision of Jasper drinking from the librarian in town, causing their family to uproot and leave suspiciously with Rosalie's anger ringing in their ears. Some days, it was an unexpected crash in the stock market that would sent Carlisle's portfolio reeling.

These hidden images, these visions that Alice saw, never came to fruition. Edward confronted her about it one day while she played piano. Not nearly as well as he could, he noted in a rare moment of spite. After years of being special, sometimes Edward resented Alice and Jasper's arrival. He never said anything and tried to deny this part of him any room in his brain, but sometimes it snuck in. Edward hated it. It made him feel like Rosalie, who grew frequently jealous when Esme and Alice bonded, or when Alice could fit into the tiny clothes at estate sales that Rosalie could not.

"Not everything you see comes true." Edward spoke from the doorframe.

Alice did not skip a note. "Is every thought you hear the truth?" She replied. "I see the possibilities more so than the future, I think. The future isn't set in stone like some people think. We certainly have paths… but the ways to get on them, or get off, can be more convoluted than even I realize."

"How many visions never… happen?"

Alice paused, thinking. He gave her the value of privacy. "It's hard to say." She said finally. "Some things, they're so clear I know for certain they'll happen. I know the exact time and place and person. Like Jasper, or our family. I knew those were for certain."

"But others, they're less… clear. They could be next month, or two decades from now. Sometimes I see only what I think are the remotest of possibilities, up until they actually happen. So it's hard to say. I think, in essence, this is because the mind is so unpredictable. Most people don't even truly know themselves or the motivations behind their actions. This leads to a lot of impulsive behavior, a lot of last-minute changes to plans in place."

"Just… humans? Or vampires, too?" Edward said, keeping his tone nonchalant.

Alice smiled at him. "Are you asking about yourself, Edward?"

He kept his face blank. "I'm asking in general."

Alice resumed her piano playing. Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu: the soft, sweet part of it that always tugged Edward's heart in just the way that he wished he could have something like Carlisle and Esme, like Alice and Jasper, even like Rosalie and Emmett. He so rarely indulged himself in romantic notions that it felt like mere nostalgia sometimes. "There are things about your future I will never tell you, Edward." Alice said in her strange lilting voice. "Things I've seen that you're better off not knowing, for good and bad reasons. How I knew everyone so well when we first arrived is because of these. You can read minds, and Jasper can sense emotions, but I can see outcomes of your true desires, current actions, and wishful thinking. I know… the possibilities, Edward. Your very truest potential."

Edward let the moment fall into silence, until Alice looked up at him and smiled, still playing that damn song. "Is it worth it?" Edward finally asked, knowing Alice understood.

Alice's mind rang with hope as clear as church bells. "It will be." She promised him. Hiding from him. He did not pry. He walked away, to his room in rainy Upper Peninsula, with fog on his ceiling-to-floor windows and Vonnegut novels to delve into once more…

But he smiled as he flitted upstairs, as he heard Alice hum Clair de Lune.

V. 1987

Alice's hair is in loose curls that rest on her jawline and her jeans are acid-washed but never ripped: she draws the line somewhere, at least. Her eyes go slack for just one moment, but recover brightly as she turns to Carlisle in the study where he is reading a textbook for his latest medical degree in progress.

"Carlisle?" she asks.

"Yes, Alice?"

"What about Forks… sometime in the next few decades? Jasper and I haven't been."

Carlisle pauses, and thinks for one moment. "It's a possibility… it's quite rainy there, we never have to pretend nor hide nearly as much. But Edward and Esme and I ran into some trouble in the '30's. We'd have to wait at least until after 2000 to really head back. 2000, minimum."

"Perfect celebration for the new millenium, then. Rosalie would like it, I bet. You know she hates to hide, and Emmett would think it'd be great to be so close to Rainier."

Carlisle smiled. "You and Jasper would like it, too, Alice. The school is small, but it's a friendly little town."

"I know I would."

Upstairs, Edward notices with vague irritation Alice's recital of Vedic texts in her mind, rapidly translating to Greek, then Latin, then Urdu, then Mandarin, and Japanese.

"Keep it to yourself," He mutters out loud.

 _I'm trying!_ She thinks at him, darting out the door.

Edward is too irritated to consider what she might be trying to hide, so he distracts himself with another Huxley novel and prays civilization doesn't end up like Brave New World. He doesn't think he could stand it if the whole world was as sex-crazed as his whole damn house seems to be.


End file.
